Recruitment & Retention

Money Matters, But MDs Want Much More

By Terese Hudson Thrall

Improving communications is critical to retention of employed physicians

Show me the money.” That seems to be the message from doctors surveyed last year about what would keep them at their jobs. In a survey of more than 1,000 hospital-employed physicians nationwide, doctors were asked to name the five most important elements in a retention plan. Four of the five elements were financial.

But salaries are not the whole story, says Pam McKemie, senior vice president at LocumTenens.com, the Alpharetta, Ga., locum tenens agency that sponsored the survey.

“Doctors don’t want to be treated as just another staff person; they feel that their ability to generate revenue is not recognized,” she says. They feel like they’re not part of the dialogue when their employers are creating policies and they want to influence how care is delivered at their institutions, she adds.

Perhaps one reason doctors move on is that they don’t see the efforts to keep them. Ninety percent of the physicians said a physician retention plan was important or very important to physician satisfaction, yet 43 percent said their hospital had no physician-specific retention plan and 34 percent said they didn’t know if the hospital had such a plan.

McKemie thinks many hospitals are just doing a poor job of communicating their efforts. Not so says Tim Skinner, a former health system physician recruiter.

“A lot of hospitals and clinics say they have a physician retention plan, but if it’s a real one, they’ll have staff assigned to monitor it. Sometimes the plans are so informal, they become easy to lose track of,” says Skinner, who is now executive director of the National Rural Recruitment and Retention Network, La Crosse, Wis.

The first three years of a doctor’s tenure are the most important, Skinner says. If they’re going to quit, it usually happens in that time frame. He recommends meeting weekly with the physician for the first six months and asking, “Is everything the way we said it was? Are you having any problems?” Meetings should continue monthly until the three-year mark and then on an as-needed basis.

Skinner recalls one such meeting when he was a health system recruiter. “A little thing” was bothering a physician: The call room, where doctors were supposed to sleep, was across from the emergency department and made for a noisy bedroom. The hospital was able to change the location to an unused patient room. “That was a small thing, but it could have grown into a big thing,” Skinner says.

Hospitals should also survey employed physicians every three years, asking about the adequacy of compensation and benefit plans and what would improve working conditions. “CEOs often don’t want to hear the answers or deal with the answers, but a smart organization pays attention to those surveys,” he says.

“There is always a better offer out there for a physician,” adds Bruce Hamory, M.D., executive vice president and chief medical officer at Geisinger Health System, Danville, Pa. Doctors stay at organizations when they are paid fairly, their families are happy and they have good working conditions, he says, adding, “If they are not happy, what you are paying them doesn’t matter.”

What Docs Want

The top five elements named by doctors employed by hospitals that should be in a retention plan:

1. 401(k) or profit-sharing
2. Flexible working hours
3. Ongoing bonus program
4. Signing bonus
5. Leave/reimbursement for continuing medical education

Source: LocumTenens.com, 2006

This article 1st appeared in the February 2007 issue of HHN Magazine.

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